MirrorMoon EP is a game about mystery and exploration set in outer space. These space travels begin on a red planet and its unique moon and extend across galaxies. The single player part of MirrorMoon EP blends adventure and exploration with navigation-based puzzle solving.

Reviews

"With beautiful artistic touches throughout and gameplay that doesn’t feel traditional at all, the experience that is MirrorMoon EP is one that will likely stick with me for years"
10/10 - Shogun Gamer

"[...] one of the most dazzling moments I’ve ever experienced in a game"
Indie Statik

"When I was a kid, I was deathly afraid of space. The stark, vast beauty of the night sky both entranced and terrified me [...] While I have long since overcome those fears, MirrorMoon brought the memories of them back with a vengeance. I have never played a game that captures the simple and dangerous beauty of space quite like it."
Game Front

About This Game

MirrorMoon EP is a game about mystery and exploration set in outer space. These space travels begin on a red planet and its unique moon and extend across galaxies.
The single player part of MirrorMoon EP blends adventure and exploration with navigation-based puzzle solving. The multiplayer of MirrorMoon EP lets players share Galaxy Maps with other players: the first explorers to land on a planet will be able to name its Star System and that name will be forever bound to the star for any other fellow traveler who encounters it.

Each Galaxy consists of a thousand Systems: it will be possible to fully discover the mysteries of MirrorMoon EP only while collaborating with other players.
Through the apparently indecipherable cockpit of an unknown spacecraft, players will be able to locate and travel to mysterious planets. Each planet has artifacts, buildings, and puzzles on its surface, hidden in astonishing low-poly sceneries.

MirrorMoon was nominated for the Nuovo Award for innovation in games at Independent Game Festival 2013 and was also part of the Official IndieCade and Fantastic Arcade 2012 selections. Since then, MirrorMoon has grown considerably. EP stands for Extended Play, representing all the new content that we added for the official release.

MirrorMoon EP is definitely an interesting exploration game. I like the visuals and the music, and the "mystery" concept is also quite intriguing, but it is so incredibly frustrating and tedious to navigate through the game.

While on a planet, I spend most of my time wandering around aimlessly on an almost empty surface. Often there's a big "map" in the sky in the form of a moon, but I can't look up at it, I can't look around me, and I can barely see a few feet in front of me.

While in space, there is a 3d map of the galaxy, but I can only scroll through the available destinations in a really tedious and error-prone way. There is a somewhat obtuse coordinate system for the planets (mystery!), which I wouldn't really mind, but there's no way to input coordinates or do anything other than scroll through the map.

The manual basically says that you have to cooperate with other players to find the end of the game, but from my experience, what they meant to say is that one person will stumble on it by accident and will maybe tell the others on the forum.

All in all, I'm trying to like this game, but it's just too frustrating.

[there may be a bit of spoiler in this review] this game felt big and small at the same time. I wanted more from it, so the experience was ultimately unsatisfying. it does a great job of making you feel lost in the immensity space - and just plain lost - and the exercise of figuring out the ship's controls was interesting. the controls themselves, though, felt a bit awkward and limiting, both on board the ship and while on a planet's surface (e.g. a game about space and star mapping, but I cannot look up at the sky when standing on a planet surface? please!) this detracted from the puzzle solving aspect. not that the puzzle aspect was that great. from what I could tell, the game has a pool of puzzle components (tools you gather, alien artifacts, astronomical effects, etc.) which interact with each other in various ways, and each planet is a quasi random arrangement of these components. once you solve a planet's arrangement you are rewarded with the opportunity to name the planet/star system. although the game is about puzzle solving for the sake of puzzle solving, and exploring for the sake of exploring, there is a loose "final" goal of identifying, reaching and solving a specific planet (the Anomaly). maybe I got (un)lucky and was able to accomplish this goal fairly quickly, affecting my impression of the game. I only explored about a dozen planets (0% of the galaxy generated for me) when I reached the Anomaly. of those that I did explore, many had trivial solutions, or seemed unsolvable. too few were in the "happy medium" between these extremes, with worthy, interesting puzzles.

the graphics are minimalistic, eerie and in tune with the openness and emptiness of space, but quickly repetitive, each planet just a barren polygonal ball of some color, with a sun and a some "random" landscape features and puzzle artifacts. something as simple as varying textures would have made the experience more appealing. between this visual barrenness and the disappointing puzzle generation, there really isn't much to entice me to return to this universe. maybe those unsolvable planets are actually solvable, and I'm sure there are alien artifacts and puzzle elements I haven't seen yet, but it just doesn't feel enough is there to put up with the long blind search through space. ultimately I expected something like the game Antichamber but in space, with planets and space wonders instead of rooms to solve. it didnt live up to that, although I admire the concept behind this game.

(contrary to what I wrote above, I did give the game another try, this time on multiplayer, but the first thing I run into is the game forcing me to play the tutorial again. really? forget it)

Saying 'yes' or 'no' to whether I recommend this game somewhat misses the point. It is a world to be immersed in. Unfortunately, rather a great deal of it is boring, simply walking around desolate planets with hardly anything on. And I don't see that it does anything that hasn't been done before. See, for example, Increpare's game 'Cities of Day and Night', available for free from his website. As for the creators of this game (an interview with them can be read at: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/10/16/the-blind-night-discovering-mirrormoon-ep/), I don't think they're as clever as they would like to think they are. For instance, getting rid of the ability to look up and down is not an innovation, but a nuisance, since as a result one can only see the 'mirror moon' - effectively a map used to help solve puzzles - from very particular angles, which makes solving puzzles difficult, and often ends up in rather tediously walking about in the hope of coming across something. Furthermore, the loading times of levels can be a matter of minutes - and since lots of the moons/planets have so little on them, one wonders why one has bothered. Still further, there isn't really an 'end' to the game, and so any feeling of progression is missing. The game does at least bring up the question of why one would want to explore space if it was so boring.

A far better explorational puzzle-solving game is 'Kairo', which is also far better on story (though it's told in an extremely oblique manner). What value this game essentially has is in showing people that, after a while, less is no longer more.

This game has such a cool atmosphere and style, it's painful to think how good it could have been. Sadly, the puzzles are annoying and unpleasant. A lot of randomly walking around with no idea what to do, and frustrating mechanics.

For example, you can't look around, you can only move using WSAD. There's a moon in the sky you can look at to figure out what's going on, the "MirrorMoon." Since you can't actually look upwards at the sky, you have to wander around until the curvature of the planet aligns you properly just to see this thing, and then try to memorize where to go before you blindly wander off looking for what to do next. A small task that should take 2 seconds becomes a huge chore. The whole time I was like "WHY CAN'T I JUST LOOK UP!?!"...

I tried to get further in this game and give it a chance, but I couldn't handle it for longer than an hour.

Sadly, I can't recommend this game unless you like this very specific kind of game.

The game is about exploration, you have no "goal". Each place you go to offers you a puzzle to solve. I had lots of trouble figuring out what to do and had to resort to looking at a guide several times, but if you enjoy exploing features then you'll probably enjoy it more than I did. I felt more like I was just pushing buttons to see what happened but never really saw a correlation between action and consequence.

The art looks cool and the games changes the environment around in interesting ways. It did, however, feel like the planets didn't offer much variation as I was fumbling in the dark.

Do you like space? Exploration? Puzzles? If so, this game might be for you. But it might not be.

Do you also like really vague goals? What about being dumped into an unfamiliar environment without any intrinsic help? Quiet emptiness? What about all that?To many people the above might be very negative points, but I feel they together paint an interesting narrative.

This game doesn’t hold your hand. It refuses to stand in the same room as you. Doesn’t even look in your general direction. Remember that one puzzle near the end of Myst where you were in a cart and had to find your way out by choosing which way to go at every intersection? A different sound effect was played at every intersection, but without some serious trial-and-error there was no way to know that the sound that played corresponded with the direction you were supposed to go in. To solve it without help, not only did you have to somehow connect the sound effect to the direction, but you had to somehow sort out *which* sound effect corresponded to *which* direction. This game is a lot like that puzzle, only the answer isn’t published anywhere and you sure as hell can’t ask your dad for help.

I’ve landed on unnamed planets where there is nothing to do at all, the only thing present is the gate to get back on the ship. There are also planets where there are things to see, but no real puzzle to be solved. When there is a puzzle to be solved, it’s back to trial-and-error, but at least you have your prior experiences to go on this time. This game is slowly paced and doesn’t spoonfeed you—sometimes you find some neat stuff on a planet, but sometimes there is nothing. I mean, even that “nothing” planet gets you closer to your goal of “find that anomaly somewhere in the universe” but that isn’t what most people are accustomed to in a game.

The minimal sound effects/soundtrack is great, and I find the game itself quite relaxing. The only annoying bit is the “in media res”-type beginning. Just like when you needed help with that Myst puzzle, I suggest you look for help on Steam with guides/forums, as well as looking through youtube videos (or I guess you could just brute force it until something sticks, like those who mapped out that entire puzzle by hand, but that too could take a while). Once you’ve grasped the first tutorial planet, you should have an idea on how the game is played and what you should be looking for.

So far, this game looks like it's going to be one of my favorite games of all time. However, I cannot say that it's perfect or spectacular without a lot of bias. This game happens to have just about everything I love in a game, so of course I really, REALLY like it, but it is not without faults.The reason why I like this game so much probably has to do with my favorite attributes to have in a video game. They would be: exploration, puzzles, atmosphere, huge size (why I like games that use procedural generation so much, which this game has) and space. So, what's good about this game:-Very atmospheric. This game is so relaxing and calm, while also keeping that mysterious air. The 'artifacts' are all interesting to look at, and the isolated feeling this game brings is just niiiiice.-Quite a bit of exploration. Each planet is unique, with lots of different artifacts to find.-Interesting puzzle mechanics. I've never seen a game with mechanics quite like this one.-Nice aesthetic. The colorful minimalist style is just really enjoyable to look at.-Basically infinite puzzles to solve. -The search for the 'Anomaly' as it's called, is really nice incentive. The very existence of the Anomaly gives this game a lot more purpose than it would have had otherwise.

What's not so good-Not friendly to people just starting out; not much explanation is given as to what to do. The mechanics and stuff aren't too confusing, and one could figure out what to do by going on the Mirrormoon EP forum on Steam, but this is still quite a problem.-If exploration isn't your thing, you probably won't like this game much, unless you really enjoy the puzzles. The main appeal of this game is split between the exploration/atmosphere (I'm lumping the two together) and the puzzles.-The puzzles are a strange mix of confusingly abstract, and too straightforward. The tutorial puzzle and the anomaly both show just how amazing the puzzles in this game can be (and there are multiple anomalies, so don't worry about there only being two really good puzzles), but then the rest of the puzzles are kind of simple. I tend to be really good at puzzle games, so I encounter this problem to some extent in most puzzle games, but this one feels like it would be a little on the easy side even to someone who wasn't good at puzzlers. Maybe that's a good thing(?) but honestly, trying to say it's a good thing, when it is clearly a turn off for those looking for a mind bending puzzle experience, would be outright lying,-I have heard of people despising the art style. Not going to lie, I think this is a stupid argument, because if you hate the art style THAT much, then you can see from the screen shots that the game won't be for you, but I can agree the art style is somewhat hit or miss. Most people I know like it, and think it looks pretty nice, but there are definitely those that hate it.

So, of course, I recommend this game. However, I have to point out flaws to be fair.

P.S. I've heard this game called 'pretentious' and 'a walking simulator' before, a few times. I think both comments are completely off base, as this game isn't pretentious at all, and calling it a walking simulator totally ignores the puzzles, you know, the main point of the game.

I want to like MirrorMoon. I really do. The tutorial is great. The "real" game, however, is less than great.It is supposed to be an art piece, about the journey and whatnot, and I get that. Most games like that, I enjoy. But this game gives you so little information about the endgame that it turns into a space exploration simulator where everything start to look the same. I am still trying to find the "anomaly" so I can say I beat this game, and it has turned into a chore. Finding new planets no longer excites me; the features are all the same. For 5 bucks, you might be intrigued for a little. Just don't plan on "finishing" MirrorMoon. You won't. Buy AntiChamber instead. It doesn't take place in space, and it is more expensive, but it is just as mysterious, and with just a little tutorial, and I have played it many times.

It's hard to rate this sort of thing. If you're anything like me, no negative review is going to stop you from buying, playing, and ultimately being disappointed anyway. I guess there's nothing wrong with that, and I can't say I regret playing this for the short time I did. It's fun to figure out the ship controls and learn to manipulate the moon artifacts, but once you do the game's pretty much over. The game just doesn't keep up that sense of discovery for very long.

You'd probably get more out of any hardcore space sim, or hell, any classic first-person or text-based adventure game like Myst or Zork. But like I said, if you're at all interested in this game, you're probably the kind of guy that won't give up hope until it's too late. So go ahead, buy it, you poor goofball.

This is a very, very very strange game. I don't mean that in a bad way, but I'm still not sure to what extent I mean it in a good way. I have 7 of 10 achievements, and I might (?) be approaching the final goal (?) but I still have no very clear idea what I'm doing. For example:

The Other Way Round:Lose the keys in SideA in a different order. I've got that achievement! Yay me! Ummm ... different from what? Was I losing keys in the same order before? I wasn't aware that I was "losing" anything, I thought I was putting stuff back. (In no particular order.) What are keys? They must be those coloured geometric thingies that give my gun-sort-of-thing different abilities.

Side A completion was at 50% the first time I noticed it, and it stayed there for many planets until it suddenly jumped to 95% ... and I hadn't noticed that I had done anything remarkable on that particular planet. Side B completion started off at 55%, I think, and has climbed all the way to 56%. Side A vs. Side B, and the purpose of each, is an interesting puzzle in itself. Some say that Side A is a "tutorial" ... unless my game is broken, it's a very strange tutorial indeed. Sort of a DIY tutorial?

This is a very, very very strange review. I guess that what I'm trying to say is that if you like the idea of a game where solving a puzzle is easier than solving the puzzle of what the puzzle is that you're solving, this is the game for you!

I've player this game for about an hour and I can already say that I love it. I understand how many people find it annoying or think it's not a real game, but artsy-farty rubbish, but that's not what I feel it is. First of all, the graphics are amazingly different from any other graphics I've seen in any other game. They're neither hi-fi like most 3D-games nowadays nor lo-fi like, for example, antichamber. They remind me of a game site called Venus Patrol and I've always loved their design. The music reminds me of early islandic electro band mûm. The athmosphere alone is fantastic and alienating, maybe like the first Metroid game, but in a different, more subtle way.

Now, the game itself made me feel like a lab monkey that was submitted to a complex intelligence test. Where am I? What is all this? What shall I do. There is no reference to anything that could help me solve any of these questions, and, as a curious little labrat, I start pressing levers, turning knobs until Ifind myself on the surface of something, wielding something and advancing towards something.

If you need action and easy clues, the game is definitely not for you. If you love a weird-but-soothing athmosphere, uncommon puzzles and intersting graphics: give it a go. I really didn't regret it!

(a) Travelling through space by pushing buttons and inserting Amstrad CPC discs in a device called Multivac EP3.(b) Exploring planets, which is sort of a trippy SF version of the desert scene in Wayne's World 2 (lacking Jim Morrison and weird naked Indian guides, though).

Certainly kinda fun (at least for a few hours I guess), but I still prefer aimlessly walking around in RL.

I love the sense of mystery around it, at the same time it frustrates the hell out of me.You just keep going, walking by faith that there is some big secret somewhere , and youl be a the first to find it, then name it.The music is very beautiful and some of the graphical combinations you come across can be realy pretty.

The only downside is, some planets are too easy, and some are seemingly impossible to unlock/name.

Its also frustrating knowing its by faith you carry on, not being 100% sure of anything. At the same time, thats what makes it so good.

This game is a very interesting one. I got it when it game out and was on sale, and decided to play it. The abstract art and music is very unique, in the fact that I have not seen it in many, or even any, other indie games. It is somewhat of a puzzle game too, tagged along by the concept of space exploration.

Overall, I would recommend this. It is a very different experience from most games you will find on Steam, and is well done as well.

MirrorMoon EP is not a game that will hold your hand. You will not often be rewarded with feedback. You will feel frustrated and lost. You will think you are right, and then be proved wrong. I would not have it any other way.

This game is about searching, failing, and floundering for understanding. If you give up easily, this isn't the game for you. The less you know when you begin, the more profound your journey will be.

This game is based on exploration, and traversing through space. It has a great style; but if you dont know what to do you are pretty much stuck on the spaceship menu thing. Not much besides the controls are explianed to you, as you learn through exploring the various planets.

A procedrually generated space themed environmental puzzle game with a focus on exploration and navigation. Puzzles are procedurally generated and run the range of obvious and simple to clever and surprising. And sometimes even after the anamoly is solved there will still be things to do and discover on the planet, revealing easter eggs and other surprises. Once an anomaly is solved you get the right to name the star, as players explore the galaxy and solve anomalies the galaxy fills up with the unique signatures of various astronauts. This is a starkly beautiful game, evocative of the Italian underground indie freeware classic Noctis. The visual themes call back to Kubrick and Tarkovsky's work. This game is all about the journey.